Free Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander

pointing to the lamp shade she had placed beside him on the bed.
    That, she said with a sigh. That’s your grandfather.
    Then she buried her face in her hands and wept.
    I’m so alone, she sobbed. I’m so frightened. How could he leave me, how could he do this?
    She cried openly now, shaking her head.
    That son of a bitch, she said.
    Kugel held the lamp shade in his hands and turned it over.
    This is Zeide? he asked.
    Mother nodded, composed herself.
    You see what they do to us? she said. There’s no peace, no peace. Wherever we go, wherever we hide. Terror and more terror and more terror.
    It says Made in Taiwan, Kugel said.
    Mother looked at him, disappointment and anger in her tearstained eyes.
    Well, they’re not going to write Made in Buchenwald, are they? she snapped.
    No, said Kugel.
    If the intended effect of the gifting of the lamp shade was to make Kugel fearful of people, it had, in actuality, something of an opposite result; he came to fear inanimate objects. If the lamp shade could be his grandfather, was the sofa his cousin? Was the ottoman his aunt? The armoire, he was certain, was giving him filthy looks. For weeks he crept outside and peed against the apartment house wall, concerned that perhaps the toilet was his uncle, the bathroom mirror an unknown but all-seeing relation disgusted by his most secret rituals. To this day, Kugel was a relentless anthropomorphizer, concerned for the agony of the logs he condemned to the fireplace, the terror of the underwear he imprisoned in the washing machine, the heartache and sorrow of the families of those innocent creatures—the grasshoppers, the ants, the frogs—that perished so gruesomely under the blade of his lawn mower.
    Never again, whispered the spiders.
    Never again, replied the crickets.
    It wasn’t until two years later, when he entered the sixth grade, that young Kugel discovered the truth. Mrs. Rosengarten, his history teacher, arranged for a class trip to a nearby Holocaust museum; the children were about to enter middle school, declared Mrs. Rosengarten, and they were old enough now to learn about man’s capacity for inhumanity to his fellow man. The students’ nervous giggling as they entered the museum was soon replaced with a timorous, reverential hush. The girls’ eyes filled with tears and they sniffed as they wiped the streaks of black eyeliner from their cheeks; the boys pretended, characteristically, to be unaffected, but their uncharacteristic silence as they moved from one exhibit to the next revealed the truth. As they entered a room labeled The Transports, one image in particular seemed to arrest the young students and stop them in their tracks. It was a photograph of the exterior of a cattle car, enlarged to such a size that it covered the entire wall. Four young women waved to the photographer through the bars of the tiny window on the side of the car. Perhaps it was their young age, in their twenties, that so shook the students; perhaps it was because they were attractive, with long blond hair, and they seemed more human than the shaven-headed prisoners that filled so many of the other photos; perhaps it was because they were smiling and waving, that they didn’t know what was coming, that they were so unaware of how bad things had already become, that they didn’t know they would likely be dead before the train ever reached its destination. Whatever the reason, the children all stopped and stood, horror struck, before this enormous image. For a moment nobody moved, nobody said a word; and then young Kugel stepped forward, pointed to the woman at the far right side of the window, and said, his small voice cracking with emotion, That . . . that’s my mother.
    He buried his face in his hands and cried.
    The students gasped.
    Those sons of bitches, wept young Kugel.
    Ellen, the pretty, dark-haired girl who sat beside him in math, looked at him with sadness in her sparkling blue eyes. Kevin, the popular star of their football